Chương 22: Chapter 21 - An Impossible Choice

Up close, the reader lenses weren't just decoration. Maren kept pushing them back up her nose with one knuckle, the same automatic gesture every few sentences, like she'd forgotten they were there until they slid. She was shorter than he'd clocked from a distance — a head under him, easily — and it didn't match the way she talked, which carried the flat certainty of someone twice her size.

Red hair, tied back and already losing the fight against the afternoon wind, a few strands stuck to her jaw that she hadn't noticed yet. Ink stained two of her fingers, dried into the creases of her knuckles. It wasn't what he'd expected from a clan that funded an entire district's worth of stone houses. Behind her, the ape Kithren had settled onto its haunches without being told to, arms folded, patient as furniture.

"So," Maren said, resting one hip against a fallen log at the path's edge like she owned it.

"Assuming you actually want a chip after all this — and I'd understand if you didn't, given the last ten minutes — there are two ways to get one." Ant didn't answer straight away. Mahkir pressed closer against his ribs, small and deliberate, and settled again.

"I'm listening," he said.

"The unclanned network can do it. People operating outside the registry, no questions about clan status, no ceremony records checked." She said it evenly, like she was reading off a price list rather than passing judgment.

"It costs, though. Money, mostly, and more of it than most people who need that route actually have — that's rather the point of needing it. Sometimes it isn't money. I've heard of people trading years of service instead. Bound to whoever did the work, for however long they decide that's worth."

"And the other way."

"You let me arrange it. Through Cerlan." She shrugged, like it barely needed saying.

"No back-alley risk to it. Done properly."

"For free."

"For free." She looked away, toward the treeline, then back.

"Though I'll be honest — there's a favour in it, eventually. I don't know yet what. Which I realise doesn't sound reassuring, said like that."

"It doesn't."

"I'd rather tell you that now than let you find out later and feel tricked into it." She pushed the lenses back up her nose again, and for the first time since she'd started talking, she didn't quite meet his eyes doing it.

"You'll get to say no when I ask. Whatever it is. I'm not — I wouldn't do that to someone, hold something over them and not let them refuse it. I just don't know yet what it'll be. I'm not being coy about it on purpose."

"You don't know what you want," Ant said, "but you're already sure I'll agree to it."

"That's — " She stopped, started again, a flush climbing up from her collar that she didn't seem to notice.

"That's not what I meant. I meant I haven't thought that far ahead, which probably sounds worse, not better." He turned the sword hilt over once under his coat — habit, not decision — and thought about the maths anyway, the way he always did, out of reflex more than hope. Soul Render might fetch coin from the right buyer. Not enough. It never came out to enough, no matter how many times his head ran the same numbers.

"Why," he said.

"You don't know me. You've said so yourself. So either this favour's enormous, or there's something else you're not telling me." Her mouth twitched, not quite offence — more like she'd been expecting the question and hadn't finished deciding how much of the real answer to hand over.

"Both, probably," she said.

"I won't pretend the favour's small. I don't know what it is yet, which means I can't promise it's minor either. And I won't pretend I don't have my own reason for wanting to understand you." She glanced past him, toward Mahkir, then back.

"My clan built the system every bonded person in this city runs on. What I watched today doesn't fit inside it. I find that more interesting than I probably should." At least it was honest. He gave her that.

"You could've walked away," he said.

"Most people would rather not know."

"Most people aren't me." No defensiveness in it, just fact.

"I'm not good at leaving a problem alone once it's interesting. It's more of a flaw than a virtue, most days." Mahkir made a small sound against his side — not quite a growl, closer to disinterest — and Ant felt the corner of his own mouth pull despite himself.

"He agrees," Ant said.

"Apparently."

"Does he." Maren's eyes went straight to Mahkir, sharp and immediate, the same look she'd worn cataloguing his stats twenty minutes ago.

"What does that even feel like? The bond. Is it like hearing him, or —""Not now," Ant said. She caught herself, actually caught herself mid-sentence, and looked faintly embarrassed before she waved it off.

"Right. Sorry. Later." He didn't need long to decide, because there wasn't much left to decide between. No money. No chip. A creature nobody could explain and a screen no chip had generated in the first place. The choice in front of him wasn't between two good options. It was only ever a choice about which risk he could stand to live inside of.

"What happens if it doesn't work," he said.

"If the chip and whatever's already in my head don't get along."

"I don't know," Maren said, and didn't dress it up.

"Whatever you have — and I assume you have something, given what I watched him do — I've never seen a read come back this blank on someone clearly bonded. I can't promise you it'll be clean."

"Can it be undone. If it goes wrong."

"Removal's possible. I won't tell you it's simple." She held his eyes on that one, didn't soften it.

"I'd rather you go in knowing that than find out partway through." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. He looked at her for a long moment — not for deception, because he'd already stopped expecting to find any. Just to see if she'd flinch from the question. She didn't.

"Fine," he said.

"Do it." Her whole posture eased, like she'd been holding a breath under the calm the entire time.

"Here?" Ant glanced around — the path, the trees, nothing that looked like it belonged anywhere near a medical procedure.

"You carrying tools for it in your coat?" That got a real laugh out of her, short and unguarded, nothing like the composed voice she'd used for the last ten minutes.

"Have you ever actually watched a chip insertion?"

"No."

"Then no. I've got a lab. Twenty minutes, maybe less if we cut through the orchard." She started moving before he'd fully agreed to follow, the ape Kithren rising and falling into step beside her without a word passing between them.

"Sterile. Private. Done right, not done fast."

"What actually happens," Ant asked, falling into step.

"During it."

"Small incision, here." She tapped just behind her own ear without looking, like the gesture was worn smooth from explaining it a hundred times before.

"The chip's smaller than a grain of rice. You won't feel it go in — you'll feel the incision closing after, which is worse, if I'm honest. The part that actually matters happens over the next few hours, not during. It reads the bond, calibrates against a baseline, starts building your profile out of nothing. Six hours, usually, before the first real screen resolves. Most people get a scatter of question marks and maybe one or two numbers that held still long enough to measure.

The rest fills in over the following days."

"So it's not instant."

"Nothing about a bond is instant. The chip just makes it visible faster than waiting years to notice your own reflexes changing on their own." She glanced at him.

"Most clans chip children straight after the ceremony, while they're still growing — a body that hasn't finished shaping itself adjusts to a new baseline easier than one that has. That's actually why Cerlan built the whole system in the first place. Wasn't meant to run every reader lens in the city. It was meant to track growth curves. How fast a bond matures a person, physically. Everything else came later, once people realized how useful the readout actually was."

"That's not exactly reassuring."

"I didn't say it would be comfortable. I said it would be done properly." The corner of her mouth pulled, playful again.

"You'll live. Mostly you'll just want to sleep for a week afterward."

"And if I don't wake up," Ant said, "when I'm supposed to."

"Then I sit there until you do." She said it plainly, like the answer had never been in real question.

"I'm not in the business of chipping someone and walking away before I know it's taken." Mahkir pressed lower against his ribs, tucking into whatever patch of afternoon sun found him through the branches. Whatever he made of chips or incisions or debts with no ceiling on them, he showed nothing that looked like concern. They walked in silence for a while before Maren spoke again.

"You're staring."

"Thinking."

"About?"

"How much I just told a stranger." His level. Mahkir's. The chip he'd never had. Five years spent learning exactly how dangerous it was to be seen clearly, undone inside a single afternoon by a woman he'd met on a footpath he hadn't even meant to walk down.

"For what it's worth, I don't think you had much of a choice in it." She glanced sideways at him, almost apologetic about it.

"I'm fairly relentless once I've decided something's worth knowing. Ask anyone who's ever tried to have a normal conversation with me."

"I noticed."

"Can I ask you something," Maren said, "and you can just not answer, if it's the wrong kind of question."

"Depends what it is."

"How common is it? Bonding late, I mean. Later than seventeen." She kept her eyes on the path ahead, the question landing lighter than it probably was.

"I've only ever seen one or two cases in Cerlan's own records, and both were treated as something close to a miracle at the time." Careful ground. He kept his voice even.

"Wouldn't know. Never really asked around about it."

"Fair enough." She didn't push, which he was grateful for, though he could feel the question still sitting there, unfinished, the kind of thing she'd clearly circle back to eventually.

"Your shoulder's still bleeding, by the way." She said it without slowing, matter-of-fact.

"Not badly. But you should know it's there before you forget and knock it against something." He hadn't noticed. Now that she'd said it, the ache found him properly, a slow throb keeping time with his pulse.

"It'll hold," he said.

"I didn't say it wouldn't. I said you should know." She led them off the main path toward a gap in a low hedge, into a stretch of trees gone silver and brittle, branches bare of anything worth calling fruit, the ground beneath them soft with old leaf-rot that gave slightly under his boots. Dead, Mahkir observed, blunt as ever. All of them.

"They're all dead," Ant said aloud, mostly to see what she'd make of it.

"Not dead. Neglected." Maren ducked a low branch, held it until Ant had passed, let it swing back.

"Nobody's pruned this in years. Cerlan's got money for a great many things. Fruit trees never made the list." Then why leave them standing at all, Mahkir said.

"Then why leave them standing at all," Ant said aloud, relaying it before he'd properly decided to.

"Honestly? Nobody's gotten around to clearing them either." Maren's mouth curved, glancing toward Mahkir like she suspected exactly whose question that had actually been.

"We're not quite as organized as the colours make us look."

"How does anyone end up in the registry," Ant asked, mostly to fill the quiet, though the question had been sitting somewhere in the back of his mind since the reader lenses first came up.

"Kithren, I mean. Is it automatic once you're chipped, or—""Automatic now, yes. Used to be manual — someone had to physically walk your details into a hall and file the paperwork by hand." She stepped around a root without looking down at it.

"My father did it that way. Grew up before any of this existed, chips or otherwise. He still doesn't fully trust a system he can't see the gears of. Drives my mother mad."

"He doesn't work from here."

"He researches further out. Comes home when he remembers to." She said it plainly enough that he couldn't tell whether it was an old grievance or a fact she'd simply stopped minding.

"That's more of my family than you asked for." Ant said nothing to that, but he noted it anyway — another small piece of her he hadn't had an hour ago. She collects broken things, Mahkir said. Ant frowned.

"What?" Maren glanced over, catching only the half of it she could actually hear.

"What, what?"

"Nothing. Talking to myself." The trees. You. Whatever she studies in that lab of hers, Mahkir went on, tail giving one slow flick, nothing urgent in it. She doesn't walk away from broken things. Ant didn't answer that one either, out loud or otherwise, but he didn't disagree with it. The smell here was different from the open path, damp wood and something faintly sweet underneath the decay that he couldn't place. The gate ahead smells of rust, Mahkir said. Your kind leaves metal to rot on purpose?

Not on purpose, Ant thought back. We just don't always get around to fixing it. Strange species, Mahkir said. Ant nearly laughed out loud. The orchard thinned into open ground, and the world on the other side of it looked like nothing Ant had walked through in years. A proper stone road picked up where the trees ended, swept clean, running past low walls with real gardens behind them instead of the packed dirt yards he was used to.

Lanterns were already being lit along the road despite the light still holding, someone moving door to door with a long taper, unhurried, like there was no reason to rush anything out here. Two men crossing toward a gate further down lifted a hand toward Maren in passing and went straight back to their own conversation, not one glance spared for the stranger walking beside her or Mahkir padding at his heel — no stares, no second looks, nothing like what he'd have drawn anywhere in the district.

Beyond a low stone wall, the house itself came into view, pale stone catching the last of the afternoon light, closer to Carrow Well than anywhere Ant had ever had real reason to walk.

"That's it," Maren said, tipping her chin toward the roofline. Maren glanced sideways at him once, said nothing further, and kept walking.